Hello Pinterest Fans

Ever cautious, I was the last to arrive on MySpace. “What is Facebook all about?” I used to wonder. I’m “on” Twitter, but there are days when I don’t know how to keep up with the tweets. True to form, I didn’t show up on Pinterest’s doorstep the day they opened for business.

In fact, I stayed away until this past weekend. All my colleagues at Vanilla Heart Publishing were all already creating boards and pins (whatever that meant) and wondered why I wasn’t.

This weekend, I was too tired to do anything else after mowing the yard, so I looked at Pinterest. Hmm, not too bad. I set up boards called Joy of Travel, Books for Fantasy Lovers, This and That from My Blogs, and Resources for Writers. Things went smoothly. It was fun. Here’s the link.

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Coming up Next: Author Dianne Marenco Salerni (“We Hear the Dead,” “The Caged Graves”) will be here in several days with a great guest post. With today’s zombie fad, we usually hear about protecting the living from the dead.  However, there have been times when the dead needed to be protected from the living.

–Malcolm

Stop by GoodReads for a chance at winning a free copy of my new novel about love, magic and fate. The giveaway ends May 21, 2013.

True Grits at Thanksgiving

This morning’s bowl of grits reminded me of many Happy Thanksgivings in the Stewart family where Ma and I sat on the front porch watching traffic on County Road 777, happy that my dear old Daddy was in the barn sleeping off a week’s worth of extra partying. We were grateful for moments of silence punctuated by the sounds of our spoons clattering against the sides of our heaping bowls of grits and homemade butter.

“It takes true grits to live in a family like ours,” Ma always said.

“You’re right as rain, Ma.”

“Yep,” she would say. “Of course, if Pa were awake, we wouldn’t have heart-to-heart moments like this.”

“We still love him though.”

“Mostly.”

“Well then, I’m grateful for ‘mostly.’”

Good times, a lot of memories, grits and a fair amount of ‘mostly.’

–Jock Stewart

Dona Nobis Pacem

One night in 1967, I picked up a white candle on the campus of Syracuse University and joined a long line of students that moved like a ribbon of continuous light across the dark campus. We did not use the words Dona nobis Pacem (Grant us Peace) as many bloggers are saying across the world on this November 4th day in which we blog for peace. We were, of course, protesting the Vietnam War in those days when many of us sang  “Where have all the flowers gone.”

Since that night of candles and songs, at least 10,960,000 have been killed by wars. “Gone to graveyards every one,” the old Pete Seeger folk song tells us. “When will they ever learn?”

My Scots ancestors once sang—and often still sing—an old song called “The Flowers of the Forest,” a lament about the grief of the women and children after James IV and his 10,000 men died at the Battle of Flodden Field in northern England in 1513.  I wonder if Pete Seeger ever heard the words: “The Flooers o’ the Forest, that fought aye the foremost, The pride o’ oor land lie cauld in the clay.”

Perhaps There’s Hope

Since 1967, we have had many occasions to ask “When will they ever learn?”  Even in these days of terrorists and unstable governments and territorial disputes that seem to have no solutions, there may be hope. In his October 2011 article in Foreign Policy “Think Again: War,”  Joshua S. Goldstein writes that even though 60% of Americans responding to a recent survey thought a third world war was likely, fewer people per year have been dying in wars in years between 2000 and 2011 than in the 1950s through the 1990s.

One reason for the decline is the smaller scale and scope of the conflicts after World War II, Korea and Vietnam. According to Goldstein, “Armed conflict has declined in large part because armed conflict has fundamentally changed. Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War, taking with them the most horrific kinds of mass destruction. Today’s asymmetrical guerrilla wars may be intractable and nasty, but they will never produce anything like the siege of Leningrad.”

Is there reason for hope in such an analysis? Goldstein suggests that the world seems more violent now than it ever did in part because information is more accessible and pervasive. Whether it’s via 24-hour news channels, online news sources, or social networks like Twitter and Facebook, we hear one way or the other about every car bomb, every attack and every atrocity. On such days, I’m still tempted to ask, “When will they ever learn?”

Higher Standards

We still have work to do, and this isn’t it. – Wikipedia Photo

The world, writes Goldstein, also seems more violent because society’s standards have risen. A day’s worth of fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan brought news of battle deaths that were a tiny fraction of the numbers killed per day in World War II. Yet our anger about every five soldiers or civilians killed in recent these conflicts was, it always seemed, much higher than for every 5,000 killed in the 1940s.

We’re less tolerant of violence now. The in-your-face nature of TV war reporting that began during the Vietnam War is showing us in ways we cannot accept where the flowers are going and how they got there. The images out of Iraq showed us more of what we didn’t want to see.

Perhaps we are learning. Perhaps our flowers of the forest will remain in the forest and the day will come when laments and folk songs about war and grief can be left on dusty shelves and slowly forgotten. Until then, we still say Dona Nobis Pacem and hope people are listening.

–Malcolm

Are we suffocating beneath a deluge of Internet drivel?

“Suddenly thanks to Google Books, JS-TOR and the like, all the great thinkers of all the civilizations past and present are one or two clicks away. The great library of Alexandria, nexus of all the learning of the ancient world that burned to the ground, has risen from the ashes online. And yet—here is the paradox—the wisdom of the ages is in some ways more distant and difficult to find than ever, buried like lost treasure  beneath a fathomless ocean of online ignorance and trivia that makes what is worthy and timeless more inaccessible than ever.” – Ron Rosenbaum, “The Last Renaissance Man,” a feature in “Smithsonian Magazine” about Lewis Lapham of “Lapham’s Quarterly”

Search Engine

Men my age are often called curmudgeons because we decry the best of the past that often is, or appears to be, lost to us.

As a journalist and writer, I wonder what happened to objective news. (Yahoo even cites personal opinion blogs as news sources.) As a grocery shopper, I wonder why I can no longer buy Winesap apples at the grocery store. As a movie viewer, I wonder why–after all the years when movie screens and TVs were getting larger and easier to see, the “in” thing now is to watch movies on screens the size of a postage stamp on one’s cell phone.  And, as an author, I wonder why rants on Amazon are considered “reviews.”

Nonetheless, I think Lewis Lapham might well be right when he suggests that the Internet is “decapitating our culture, trading the ideas of some 3,000 years of civilization for…BuzzFeed.”

On any given day, the Yahoo “news” main story is more likely to be about either the jaw-dropping dress or the hideous fashion blunder of an actress than a news story about anything that remotely matters.

Why is this?

There are a lot of usual suspects…parents “rearing children” to believe they are entitled to everything free or almost free…the whole “teach the test” approach to education…liberal arts colleges giving way to colleges that offer direct training for one industry or another…Twitter and other nasty sites that champion having a short attention span…something in the drinking water…deadly rays from cell phones…and, perhaps, various forms of self-centered greed.

Take your pick.

Half Empty or Half Full

When asked whether a glass is half empty or half full, positive people supposedly say it’s half full. That beats empty. On the other hand, perhaps the correct answer is the glass is larger than necessary, rather like using a gallon jar for a task requiring a thimble.

We can see the drivel all too easily. On the other hand, we can tune it out. The Internet is far too large to contain only what each of us wants. Whether we see the amount of drivel as information democracy or an unlimited smorgasbord, the challenge is finding better ways to tell the drivel sites from the trash sites, and to discover new ways of finding the hidden gems.

For every one hundred people who appear on Leno’s “Jay Walking”  bits in which he asks everyday people simple questions about history, geography and culture who can’t tell us the capital of their own state, there are (hopefully) five people who knew all the answers but didn’t make the show because correct answers aren’t funny. (I wonder why the incorrect answers are funny.) I’m not sure the amount of drivel in the world is increasing but rather that it’s more visible with the Internet, more TV channels, 14-hour news, and the social media.

On its “about us” page, Lapham’s Quarterly says it, “embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern—War, Religion, Money, Medicine, Nature, Crime—by bringing up to the microphone of the present the advice and counsel of the past. Valuable observations of the human character and predicament don’t become obsolete.”

I find many treasures on the Internet. Finding them is, at times, like going to a garage sale and looking through somebody else’s trash for something I will treasure. Finding one’s treasure has never been easy. Even before Gutenberg made the dissemination of the written word easier to do when he introduced movable type about 1439, there was a lot of drivel in the world. It didn’t take long for people to decry books they thought were either hopeless or heretical.

When Newton Minnow told the National Association of Broadcasters in 1961 that television was a “vast wasteland,” the notion that the drivel outweighed the most wonderful programs being produced wasn’t new.  Minnow suggested more government involvement in fixing the problem than I liked. It’s really difficult to force people to read only the best books and watch only the best movies and TV shows. It’s utterly impossible to say which books/films/shows those are.

In the half-full/half-empty glass puzzle, one can always begin with too small a glass, meaning that some of the water isn’t going to fit. Even though the too-large glass has a lot of air in it, there’s space available for whatever we want to add. Perhaps it’s more water. Perhaps it’s rocks. I like seeing empty space in a glass or on the Internet because that means there’s always room for more. If only 5% or 10% of that more is any good, we still end up with a greater number of tasty sips of water (or, perhaps, Scotch) than before.

There used to be a joke site or two claiming that “you have reached the end of the Internet,” meaning the last possible URL that was out there. Scary thought. In some ways, an online facility with more drivel also has more treasures. Each of us can decide which are which and how to tell the difference.

–Malcolm

Another day older and deeper in debt

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt

from “Sixteen Tons,” as recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford

There was a lot of pure country music on the radio when I was young, especially on the powerful clear channel AM stations that could be heard throughout large areas of the country after dark. I heard Ford a lot on the radio, along with everyone else who recorded a version of “Sixteen Tons.”  I don’t hear the song much any more, but the words still resonate with me during these difficult economic times. One doesn’t have to be a coal miner stuck in the old country store and truck system (payment in goods rather than cash) to understand the feeling of  “I owe my soul to the company store.”

These days, the company store is the mortgage company, the credit card company, the IRS, the county property taxes, and a host of other payments that keep a lot of people behind the 8 ball. As for the load sixteen tons, we could substitute “write sixteen novels” or “drive 1600 miles” or “work sixteen years” or whatever fits.

Oddly enough, though, I only think of that “another day older” line and start hearing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s voice on my birthdays. That’s good, I think, for it keeps industrial-strength worrying about finances to a minimum. That was yesterday. Today, I’m blogging about it and then moving on. As Smoky Zeidel said in today’s post, “I’m a True Writer: a writer who not only can write, but must write.”

Sometimes must write = curse. But most of the time, writing is a creative way to stop oneself from worrying about being deeper in debt or how long the drought’s going to last or why political campaigns bring so many clowns out of the woodwork.  It seems a bit audacious to say that writers create worlds, so I’ll just suggest we’re creating cities, lakes and mountains. If I don’t like what I see, the backspace key comes in very handy. It won’t erase actual debt, but it will erase scenes in my short stories that aren’t turning out quite right.

On my birthday yesterday, I wrote a fair number of words of a new short story, saw a friend of mine stop by unannounced and mow my lawn with his riding mower, ate a plateful of spaghetti, talked to my brothers on the phone, had a glass of Biltmore Pinot Noir, got some reading done, and felt pretty good about things in spite of hearing  “I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine,  I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal.”

I also heard Ford’s radio/TV sign-off catch phrase: “Bless your pea-pickin’ heart!” and found it hard not to smile.

Malcolm

The Internet is Drugs

As I sit here in the sunny kitchen of my father-in-law’s farmhouse, I’m going through withdrawal because the Internet does not exist here. On a typical morning, I would have checked e-mail (pot), looked at several news screens (cocaine) and read everything in my Facebook (meth) news feed.

My Facebook status would be a no-brainer: blitzed, spaced out, and higher than the summit of Mount Everest. I recall those old, fried-egg-in-a-skillet public service announcements: This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?

Ever addictive, the Internet provides 24/7 instant gratification. Everything is now and now we can trip out anywhere we want from the illusions of You Tube right now to the mirages of web cams. On celestial days, the endless supply of self-evident platitudes on Twitter (hash) empowers us. On tense days, we can discuss causes on Linked-In (ether) or play free-base flame wars in the comments sections of news pages and friends’ profile pages and hope the experience doesn’t turn into the bad trip of being unfriended or banned.

Here on the farm, life is also now, but it’s a slower, less ubiquitous now. I cannot move at light speed from the kitchen table to the creek. There’s no creek icon on the window. While I can randomly hear the sounds of birds and horses and tractors, they are farther away than MP3 files and have no volume controls. Time was, contentment was easy to find in a farm or old forest because when I arrived at such places, my perception synchronized itself with the rhythms of the real world.

Today, the worlds of beach, river and mountain top begin as cold-turkey experiences away from the lovable and addictive noise of radios, televisions, cell phones and WiFi. Real-world taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell and intuition have become dulled from lack of use. I can’t wrinkle my nose and download a new sight program nor stick out my tongue and update my tastes.

Daily, it takes more and more effort to see and hear the real world, especially the more subtle voices of trees and snakes and flowers. In fact, when I’m high on Facebook, I have my doubts about the existence of pastures outside my father-in-law’s sunny kitchen, much less the cries of gulls along the gulf coast or the songs of wolves in the Montana high country. The Internet will give me a semblance of all that. Truth be told, that semblance is faster and cheaper than walking out my front door and driving six hours south to Alligator Point, Florida, much less three days north by northwest to East Glacier, Montana on the edge of the shining mountains.

If the Internet existed here on the farm, I could experience, semblance-wise, the mountains and the sea right here, right now. I do see flowers blooming in the garden out past the kitchen sink. I remember once knowing what they were and what they smelled like but, without the Internet, I can’t “touch” the flowers’ images and see alt-text tags with that instant information.

The real world has become difficult to navigate and harder to imagine. I’ll be okay when I get back home and smoke a little e-mail and do a little Facebook. I’ll be fine because my brain will once again become part of the Internet and I won’t have any questions.

– Malcolm  

Out of the Darkness

Every sixteen minutes, someone in the United States dies by suicide, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP).

The AFSP conducts Out of the Darkness walks to increase national awareness and to help raise funds for education and research for suicide prevention.

I am pleased that my brother, Barry, will be participating in the upcoming Orlando, Florida Annual Community Walk on February 5th. He will be walking for TEAM STRAT in honor of the late rap artist and poet David Campbell (STRAT).

“Although we have lost him in life, he will always live on through his son Taylor, his poetry, his music, and many wonderful memories.”

The Orlando walk will be held February 5, 2011 at Baldwin Park: 2420 Lakemont Ave.

A Sense of Wonder

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.” — Rachel Carson

After the basic needs are met, I can think of little that is more important in the upbringing of a child than cultivating a sense of wonder.

When I see adults who have bright and twinkling eyes, who are forever learning new things, who are inquisitive and gentle about the natural world, who have the grit and spirit to take risks, who are not afraid to cry, who take responsibility for their own actions, who believe one way or another in magic and worlds they cannot see, then I know they were loved as children.

Where there is creativity and an infinite ability to dream, there is hope. As a father, I could do no better than teach the joy of an open mind; as a writer I could do no less than write it and live it.

BOOK REVIEW COMING SOON

I’m currently reading a wonderful and well written novel by Fairlee Winfield called “Buffaloed.” In a word: it’s a hoot. It shows the West like it was rather than like it was idealized to be. And, one of the main characters is none other than Montana’s best artist: Charlie Russell.

Malcolm

Hero’s Journey Curriculum

“Dating from before history, the Hero’s Journey duplicates the steps of the Rite of Passage and is a process of self-discovery and self-integration. The Hero’s Journey is a concept drawn from the depth psychology of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the scholar and mythologist Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.” — Nina Munteanu

The hero path, as postulated by Joseph Campbell in 1946, has not only proven to be a durable means of exploring mythic heroes, but as a way of exploring great literature and our personal journeys. While adding additional hero’s path resources to the web site of my hero’s journey novel The Sun Singer, I re-discovered the Harris Communications site with its excellent Hero’s Journey Curriculum. Written by a teacher, this curriculum has been tested by years of experience as well as its usage in many school systems.

If I had kids in a K-12 environment, I’d use the curriculum in homeschooling or hope at least one of the public school teachers was using it. Whether you personally need the curriculum yourself or for your children’s teachers, the web site has many interesting articles and resources that show the positive impact of hero’s journey ideals for children.

Hero's Journey

Publisher’s Description: The Hero’s Journey: A Guide to Literature and Life is a 184-page teacher’s manual designed to help instructors teach and use the hero’s journey pattern in class. The curriculum, which has been in print for 13 years, includes:

* Full lesson plans, with background notes and suggested approaches;
* Student projects and activities,
* Student handouts and graphic organizers,
* Samples and models for projects and activities
* Spiral bound to open flat for lecture or copying.
* Space for your own notes and plans

Click here for more information.

December 22nd Checklist

1. Sneak wife’s last present into house and wrap it without getting caught.
2. Eat nutritious raspberry PopTart for Breakfast.
3. Read another chapter of “Rhett Butler’s People.”
4. Find out what the cats are tearing up in the livingroom.
5. Steal firewood from drunk guy next door.
6. Remind people to read short stories on my Eye Blink Fiction site and leave comment for chance to win copy of “Tethered.”
7. Check fruitcake supply.
8. Wish Merry Christmas to Nancy, FF&F, Elizabeth, Montucky, Pinhole, Nora, Esmaa, Sue, Freya, Lesa, Johanna, Doug, Ian, Josh, Barry, Mary, Rebecca, Trish and Roxane.
9. Put out more bread crumbs and sunflower seeds for birds.
10. Remind cats not to eat birds.
11. Put link to Montucky’s snow photographs on my Facebook page.
12. Have “precautionary shot” of Scotch to keep from getting flu.
13. Ask Obama why he appointed Ken Salazar to Interior post.
14. Lure more people to Writer’s Notebook weblog with post giving away first secret of storytelling.
15. Adopt a wolf.
16. Refurbish dreamcatchers for 2009.
17. Send SPAM Christmas cards to Tammy22, Viagra Bob, EasyCredit Sue, and Mrs. Libertado Andelusia in Liberia as my way of saying thanks for all the goof ball e-mail you sent me this year.
18. Buy ammo for shooting people with bah humbug attitude.
19. Make sure I have a solid alibi.
20. Smile more often.